Back from my first big (3 days) conference trip of the year, I’m full of ideas and suggestions that I can’t wait to share with the team and see how we can implement them quickly. Here are a couple of the thoughts that are on my mind:
My buddy Howard Cunningham (www.macrollc.com) is having back surgery this week. Howard is perhaps the most valuable employee of Own Web Now and ConnectWise while not receiving a $1 paycheck from either company 🙂 All around a really great guy and a tremendous resource for the SMB community. If you’ve had a pleasure of working or talking with Howard I hope you pull for him this week.
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On an entirely different note, when you live in a public eye and share your life with people, you have to have a sense of humor. When you don’t – and you confront people with it – that tends to backfire and spread like fire through people who both like and dislike you. End result: instead of laughing at a joke, you become a joke. It’s really sad to see but it is a reminder that for all it’s benefits this “social networking” stuff isn’t just a great tool but the real people behind it have real feelings and if you can’t handle that, blogging / twittering / facebooking / etc probably is not for you.
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The missing piece is the track record. Everyone has a great idea now and then. It’s not that difficult to raise a hand, buy some PR and say you’re the next big thing. For each brilliant innovation there are dozens of existing things that are already successful at it. The difference between everything that looks pretty much the same is the track record: because everyone has ideas, few people can actually show results.
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Don’t ask me to talk about disposable email addresses. Seriously, even gmail.com supports an on-demand email address: vmazek+whateveryouwant@gmail.com – you can even find out who shared it with someone else using the search and see how many times it was reported. And I understand that some of you think this is the coolest thing since sliced bread and love that we too support it, I am not going to make it a part of my presentation. Sorry. I can’t stand in front of people for half an hour and talk to them about SOX, SEC, HIPAA, explaining the policy management, policy violation notifications, traffic shaping, routing and business continuity, blah blah blah… oh, and by the way, just append a dot at an email address to bypass all that shit. Maybe if I didn’t have encryption, web filtering, web sharing, LiveArchive, compliance archiving or routing policies to speak of I would mention it but in the meantime, if you need your viagra orders to get by the spam filters just do everyone a bit of common sense and don’t use your business account for it 🙂
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// By the way, the rant above sounds much better when I’m yelling it out loud at Brian 🙂
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Redeye flights suck 🙁
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